1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of network communication and transacting and pertains particularly to call transaction history and Web transaction history management.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
The World Wide Web (WWW) also referred to as the Internet has become a major tool for conducting business. Customer service is essential to any good customer/business relationship and a critical piece of customer service is understating the customer and what the customer wants in products and services. Companies today conduct much of their business online through Web sites that offer a wide range of interactions and services. Many of these same companies are also accessible through the telephone network via call centers where live agents and automated systems are available to process orders and assist with customer service needs. More recently, some services have developed technologies that enable a combination of telephone assistance and Web assistance for clients who are dually connected to the company through those respective mediums.
More often though, clients of companies will access services and place orders through the Web, or via the telephone. On the Internet, the company may track browsing behavior of clients through the use of Web cookies. Web cookies are simple machine readable text files that are generated in a server and exchanged between a customer's computer and the server when the customer accesses the server over the network. Web cookies may be temporary (deleted after a session), or they may be persistent (having an expiration date).
A web cookie or a series of cookies can be used to identify and track where a customer has been at a Web site, for example, what resources the customer clicked on to view or download. Likewise, cookies may be used to track customer history at the site including transaction history. Therefore, when the customer logs on to the site, the server receives a cookie back from the customer's machine, the cookie providing the desired information about the customer at the point and time of access. If the customer creates new history at the site, then the server updates the cookie and may send it back to the customer sometime before the end of the session. Every time the customer accesses the site, the most recent cookie is available to give the site information about the customer.
In telephony, customers are identified by one or more telephony protocols like caller line identification service (CLIS) and then checked against a customer account database to access any history if the caller has done business with the company before. If the caller is new, then a new account may be created for the caller. Typically, caller history is added to the account history for the caller after the caller has been serviced and that history may be searched and updated periodically as the caller continues to business with the company.
One problem with the separate approaches for tracking history for companies that maintain both Web interfaces and telephony interfaces is that when the customer accesses services through the Web, the telephony account history is not readily available to the Web server. Likewise, when the customer accesses services over the telephone, the customer's Web history is not immediately available.
Therefore, what is needed are methods and a system that can integrate Web and telephone account histories and provide the service point with complete customer information about past interactions with the company over both mediums while the customer is conducting a business session with the company.